Saturday, June 2, 2012

Everyday on the CitizenTube channel (and @CitizenTube on Twitter), along with our curation partners @storyful, we look at how the top news stories are covered on YouTube. Each week we post a weekly recap of the top news stories of the week, as seen through the lens of both citizen-reported footage and professional news coverage.

Last month we announced that we would be changing how creative rotation works in AdWords. Specifically, we changed the even rotation setting to rotate evenly for a period of 30 days, after which AdWords would optimize to show your higher performing creatives more frequently.

In the past month, we've heard a number of concerns from you about this change. Thank you for all of the feedback -- we've been listening carefully to determine the right course of action. The concerns have focused on (1) the lack of an opt-out for this change and (2) the potential that the 30 day even rotation window might be shorter than your testing window for new ads. You also inquired about why we made the change.

First, we’d like to share a little more about why we updated how creative rotation works. With the modified Rotate evenly setting, our tests indicate that we will provide you with more valuable traffic in an automated, efficient manner. We've found that, on average, optimized creative rotation results in an increase in click-through rate and an increase in total conversion volume for advertisers. Here’s an example describing the benefit (note: data is intended for illustrative purposes only):

Advertisement A has a 3% CTR, while Advertisement B has a 1% CTR. Under the original Rotate evenly setting, the ads would show roughly evenly, resulting in an average CTR of around 2%. Under the new setting, Advertisement A will show more frequently after the even rotation window has passed, bringing the average CTR closer to 3%, or a 50% increase in clicks. Our systems will also continue to run Advertisement B for a low fraction of traffic to continue to test how well it performs.

Also, in response to your feedback, we're planning to make two changes to the setting. First, we'll expand the even rotation period from 30 days to 90 days to give you a longer window for testing new ads. Second, if you still wish to have your ads rotate evenly indefinitely, we're going to offer an opt-out of this change. You can opt-out by filling in your information on this form or by contacting your account representative. Both of these changes will go into effect on June 11, 2012.

If we see a large amount of demand for the opt-out over the next few weeks, we'll also offer the opt-out in the AdWords interface directly.

We're confident that the changes we've made to ad rotation enable us to show higher quality ads to our users and better performing ads for our advertisers. However, we also realize that it is important to provide you with the freedom and time to decide what works best for you and that's why we're announcing these changes today. Please continue to share your feedback so that we can build solutions to meet your advertising needs.

One of the most important goals of Google Summer of Code is to give students the experience of working in an open source environment and encourage them to stay involved even after the program concludes. A meaningful value to measure future commitment is the number of recurring students who decide to take up another challenge and participate in the program again. We see returning students who decide to take up another challenge and participate in the program multiple times as a healthy sign of future commitment and engagement in the open source community. This year we proudly welcome 176 “sophomores", approximately 14.5% of students, participating in their second Google Summer of Code.

Below is a detailed table showing how many students have taken part in previous editions of the program.

Student 2009

Student 2010

Student 2011

Student 2012

Total Number of Students

X

X

152

X

X

19

X

X

5

X

X

X

33

X

X

X

4

X

X

X

4

X

X

X

X

7

As you can see, there are more than 40 veterans who have participated in three of the last four years. Seven other students have spent every summer since 2009 writing code for their amazing Google Summer of Code projects.

Now let’s investigate how multi-year students migrate between organizations over the years. Let us take into consideration only the students who have participated in the program at least three times. Over 75% of these serial Google Summer of Coders have worked with only one or two different organizations, while exactly one third of them have worked with just one. There are even two students who have been with us for the last four years and have always been accepted by the same organization - one with Samba and one with OpenICC. The table below presents more details.

3rd Time Students

4th Time Students

1 organization

14

2

2 organizations

19

2

3 organizations

8

2

4 organizations

1

These figures show that the engagement rate among our recurring students is high which translates to more dedicated and enthusiastic developers. We give a big thanks to all the mentors and administrators who put such a great deal of effort into the program each year. It is your hard work and commitment to the students and your projects that encourage the students to apply again!

Stay tuned for another post in the coming weeks regarding the student to mentor transition and other fun numbers for this year's Google Summer of Code.

We’re always adding new features to DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP). The list below contains some highlights. For a complete list, please visit the DFP or DFP Small Business Help Centers.

Available in DFP and DFP Small Business:

Inline Editing for Line Items and Creatives: We’re constantly innovating to bring simplicity and time saving processes to DFP. To help speed up the editing process of line items and creatives, you can now update several parameters of your line items and creatives from the Order Overview page rather than clicking into, and editing each item separately.

Standalone Creative Library: To get your work done more efficiently, we’ve designed the new link “Creatives” on the Orders-Tab. This location gives you access to all creatives uploaded to your network where you can review them by name, advertiser, type and size. When clicking into a creative, you have access to the complete creative object and its assignments, which allows you to make changes without first having to open a respective campaign. We think you’ll notice that this is one more way we’re helping to speed up workflow.

Available in DFP Mobile:

Tagging Upgrade: Many of you have asked for this and now mobile Google Publisher Tags (GPT) have been upgraded to support additional features you’re familiar with from desktop tags such as asynchronous rendering.

Available in DFP Video:

Merge/Removal of Duplicate Videos: To further help with efficiency, DFP now has the functionality to merge or remove duplicate videos. This is particularly useful when using more than one CMS to upload videos into DFP, which often leads to duplicates showing up.

Content Filtering: To help with the organization of your uploaded videos, you can now view them by using the following filters in the Content-Tab: name, source, source name or content ID. This feature also lets you narrow down your results by allowing you to combine filter criteria as well.

UI Enhancement for Displaying Video Content: To provide you with even more controls and insights on your video content, additional information has been added to the Video Content Overview page such as video preview capability, import date and targeting criteria.

There has been explosive growth in ad technology over the last 20 years. From each of our perspectives -- whether you are an agency, an advertiser, publisher or a technology provider -- we can all still see unprecedented opportunities as the digital world continues to grow and diversify.

We believe that as an industry, we’re on a common digital journey and that the next wave of innovation in ad tech will come from us all working better together.

However, like all great opportunities, there are challenges and questions, such as:

How do we unlock the next $50 billion of opportunity for digital advertising?

How do we deliver those immersive, interactive experiences to today’s empowered consumer demands?

What do we, as part of the ad tech ecosystem, need to build to create even more value for our clients and consumers?

On June 5th we’re hosting DoubleClick Insights to start exploring some answers to these questions. Senior leaders from top agencies, advertisers and publishers will help lead the conversation -- and you’re invited to join via the live stream! Register here.

The agenda will include topics such as:

Adapting to the Empowered Consumer:Neal Mohan, Vice President, Display Advertising at Google will be joined by David Kenny, Chairman & CEO, The Weather Channel Companies, and James Pitaro, Co-President, Disney Interactive Media Group, to discuss how technology is being used to deliver new content and advertising experiences to consumers.

If We Build It, Will They (Consumers) Come? Terry Kawaja, CEO and Co-Founder, Luma Partners (and creator of the now legendary LUMAscape chart) will lead a conversation about the ad tech ecosystem, and what it needs to do next to add value for agencies, publishers, marketers – and ultimately consumers. Terry will be joined onstage by:

Omar Tawokol, Chief Executive Officer, BlueKai

Greg Stuart, Global CEO of Mobile Marketing Association

Kurt Unkel, President, VivaKi

Shishir Mehrota, Vice President of Product Management, YouTube

Outside the Box: Technology = Creative Friend or Foe?Technology is supposed to make the life of a marketer easier. For our final conversation, we’re going to focus on the question of: Is this technology exploring resulting in better marketing? Or, is it just resulting in mediocre creative and complexity for both consumers and marketers? Karim Temsamani, Vice President - New Products and Solutions, Google moderates the conversation with leaders from creative agencies, iconic brands and publishers including:

Brad Ruffkess, Global Connection, Coca-Cola

Mike Lowenstern, Managing Director of Digital Advertising, R/GA

Peter Minnium, Head of Digital Brand Initiatives, IAB

John Caldwell, Chief Digital Officer, National Geographic

The live stream will start on June 5, 2012, at 9:00 am PDT, and you’ll be able to watch from your computer, tablet, or mobile device. To learn more about our highlighted speakers go to theSpeakers page on our site.

Last week we announced that Neal Mohan, Google's VP of Display Advertising, will sit down with industry leaders to explore the explosive growth in ad technology and the next wave of innovation in ad tech. Tune in to the DoubleClick Insights event on June 5th via the live stream to hear leaders from top publishers, advertisers and agencies.

Adapting to the Empowered Consumer - Neal Mohan, Vice President, Display Advertising at Google will be joined by David Kenny, Chairman & CEO, The Weather Channel Companies, and James Pitaro, Co-President, Disney Interactive Media Group, to discuss how technology is being used to deliver new content and advertising experiences to consumers.

If We Build It, Will They (Consumers) Come? Terry Kawaja, CEO and Co-Founder, Luma Partners (and creator of the now legendary LUMAscape chart) will lead a conversation about the ad tech ecosystem, and what it needs to do next to add value for agencies, publishers, marketers – and ultimately consumers. Terry will be joined onstage by:

Omar Tawokol, Chief Executive Officer, BlueKai

Greg Stuart, Global CEO of Mobile Marketing Association

Kurt Unkel, President, VivaKi

Shishir Mehrota, Vice President of Product Management, YouTube

Outside the Box: Technology = Creative Friend or Foe? Technology is supposed to make the life of a marketer easier. For our final conversation, we’re going to focus on the question of: Is this technology exploring resulting in better marketing? Or, is it just resulting in mediocre creative and complexity for both consumers and marketers? Karim Temsamani, Vice President - New Products and Solutions, Google moderates the conversation with leaders from creative agencies, iconic brands and publishers including:

Brad Ruffkess, Global Connection, Coca-Cola

Mike Lowenstern, Managing Director of Digital Advertising, R/GA

Peter Minnium, Head of Digital Brand Initiatives, IAB

John Caldwell, Chief Digital Officer, National Geographic

The live stream will start on June 5, 2012, at 9:00 am PDT, and you’ll be able to watch it from your computer, tablet, or mobile device. To learn more about our highlighted speakers go to the Speakers page on our site.

Over the last 5 years, it’s been great to see how many marketers and publishers have improved the web by using insights from Google Website Optimizer to create better experiences for their visitors. Today, we announced that we’re bringing website testing to Google Analytics. This means that we’ll be saying goodbye to the standalone version as we welcome a fully integrated website testing tool in Google Analytics.

Content Experiments helps you optimize for goals you have already defined in your Google Analytics account, and can help you decide which page designs, layouts and content are most effective. With Content Experiments, you can develop several versions of a page and show different versions to different visitors. Google Analytics measures the efficacy of each page version, and with a new advanced statistical engine, it determines the most effective version. Take a look at this video to learn more:

Testing and experimentation of websites may sound complicated, but we've worked hard to provide a testing tool that makes it as easy as possible:

Content Experiments comes with a setup wizard that walks you step by step through setting up experiments, which helps you quickly launch new tests.

Content Experiments reuses Google Analytics tags so that you only need to add one additional tag to the original page.

Content Experiments helps you understand which content performs best, and identifies a winner as soon as statistically significant data has been collected.

Since content testing is so important, we’ve placed Content Experiments just a click away from your regular diagnosis reports in Google Analytics.

We’re excited to integrate this important functionality into Google Analytics and believe it will help you meet your goals of measuring, testing and optimizing all in one place. With full integration in Google Analytics, we’ll be able to grow and evolve website experimentation tools within our broader measurement platform. Initially, you’ll be able to utilize important features like optimized goal conversions, easier tagging and advanced segmentation in reports. We’re also working hard to release page metrics, additional goal conversion options and experiment suggestions.

The last day you’ll be able to access Google Website Optimizer, and any reports for current or past experiments, will be August 1, 2012. While it won’t be possible to migrate experiments or reports to Google Analytics, up until August 1 you can download your reports to retain your data. We encourage you to start any new experiments in Content Experiments. For those of you that are new to website experimentation, we hope you’ll try out the new Google Analytics Content Experiments.

This is just the first step we’re taking to simplify website testing, and we look forward to integrating more features into the experimentation framework of Google Analytics. Content Experiments will be gradually rolling out over the next few weeks to all users. Once available in your account, you can start testing by going to Google Analytics and accessing Experiments within the Content section of your reports. If you’re new to Google Analytics, you can sign up here.

We’ll continue to have a strong network of Google Analytics Certified Partners who will be able to provide advanced support for Analytics, including Content Experiments. If you would like professional assistance in designing, implementing, or interpreting the results of a test, simply go to the Google Analytics Partner page and select "Website Optimizer" from the Specialization menu. You can also find more information in our help center. Please try out Content Experiments and let us know what you think.

Friday, June 1, 2012

Over the last 5 years, it’s been great to see how many marketers and publishers have improved the web by using insights from Google Website Optimizer to create better site experiences. Today, we’d like to announce the release of Google Analytics Content Experiments, which brings website testing to Google Analytics.

We’re excited to integrate content testing into Google Analytics and believe it will help meet your goals of measuring, testing and optimizing all in one place. Content Experiments helps you optimize for goals you have already defined in your Google Analytics account, and can help you decide which page designs, layouts and content are most effective. With Content Experiments, you can develop several versions of a page and show different versions to different visitors. Google Analytics measures the efficacy of each page version, and with a new advanced statistical engine, it determines the most effective version. You can watch this video to learn more:

Testing and experimentation of websites may sound complicated, but we've worked hard to provide a testing tool that makes it as easy as possible:

Content Experiments comes with a setup wizard that walks you step by step through setting up experiments, and helps you quickly launch new tests.

Content Experiments reuses Google Analytics tags so that you only need to add one additional tag to the original page.

Content Experiments helps you understand which content performs best, and identifies a winner as soon as statistically significant data has been collected.

Since content testing is so important, we’ve placed Content Experiments just a click away from your regular diagnosis reports in Google Analytics.

With full integration in Google Analytics, we’ll be able to grow and evolve website experimentation tools within our broader measurement platform. Initially, you’ll be able to utilize important features like optimized goal conversions, easier tagging, and advanced segmentation in reports. We’re also working hard to release page metrics, additional goal conversion options and experiment suggestions.

Since we’re rolling much of the Google Website Optimizer functionality into Google Analytics, it’s time for us to say goodbye to the standalone tool. The last day you’ll be able to access Google Website Optimizer, and any reports for current or past experiments, will be August 1, 2012. We encourage you to start any new experiments in Content Experiments. For those of you that are new to website experimentation, we hope you’ll try out the new Google Analytics Content Experiments.

This is just the first step we’re taking to simplify website testing, and we look forward to integrating more features into the experimentation framework of Google Analytics. Content Experiments will be gradually rolling out over the next few weeks to all users. Once available in your account, you can start testing by going to Google Analytics and accessing Experiments within the Content section of your reports.

We’ll continue to have a strong network of Google Analytics Certified Partners who will be able to provide advanced support for Analytics, including Content Experiments. If you would like professional assistance in designing, implementing, or interpreting the results of a test, simply go to the Google Analytics Partner page and select "Website Optimizer" from the Specialization menu. You can also find more information in our help center. Please try out Content Experiments and let us know what you think.

This morning Google Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf will testify before the House Energy and Commerce Communications and Technology Subcommittee on Internet Governance and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

The hearing will examine international proposals to regulate the Internet; specifically the ITU’s recent efforts to increase its authority over Internet governance. The ITU is an agency of the United Nations which has focused on setting international standards and policies for telephone services and radio frequencies. Expanding their authority into Internet governance has the potential to restrict and endanger the future of the open Internet.

Vint’s testimony emphasizes the importance of a multi-stakeholder approach to Internet governance and technical management. He also encourages the U.S. Government—in partnership with like-minded countries and their citizens—to engage in the ITU process to ensure transparency, openness and innovation and protect free expression.

You can read his written testimony and watch the webcast of the hearing starting at 10:15 AM Eastern.

Thursday, May 31, 2012

Editor’s Note: Today’s guest author is Greg Moore, President of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. Google is excited to help support this celebration of the Golden Gate Bridge.

On May 27th, the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge celebrated its 75th anniversary. Our organization, the non-profit Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, is working with the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District; the National Park Service; the Presidio Trust; and the City of San Francisco to help commemorate this landmark event.

As president of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, I have the privilege of enjoying the majestic architecture of the bridge and its landscape on a regular basis. This iconic Bridge stands at the center of the Golden Gate National Parks.

However, we’re pleased to announce that now the American spirit and beauty of the bridge will be available to everyone. Our new interactive website, Band of Bridges, brings the celebration of the Golden Gate Bridge’s 75th anniversary into everyone’s homes.

The website enables visitors to virtually connect bridges from around the world to the Golden Gate, making what we hope will be the longest bridge in history. Using the Google Maps API, users can navigate every corner of the Earth and search for bridges or enter a specific bridge they are already familiar with—maybe even one from their hometown. Each new bridge added will connect to preceding bridges, resulting in spans that stretch hundreds (or thousands) of digital miles.

With the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics approximating 600,000 bridges in the United States alone, we hope to connect thousands of bridges and people from across the globe.

Just as the Golden Gate blends together its surrounding nature, culture and people, Band of Bridges, conceived by San Francisco advertising agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners and brought to life by the Google Maps team in Mountain View, is a culmination of the amazing creative and technological talent of the Bay Area in California.

The Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy would like to thank Goodby Silverstein & Partners and Google for bringing such vision, beauty and authenticity to our efforts.

Please join us in celebrating the Golden Gate Bridge’s 75th anniversary and be part of our Band of Bridges.

Posted by Greg Moore, President of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy

I’ve always been fascinated by famous historic and cultural sites from around the world. When I was a child, flipping through encyclopedias while researching for school projects, the thought of exploring these sites was a distant dream. With the new Google World Wonders Project, that dream is now a little closer for students and others around the globe.

The World Wonders Project enables you to discover 132 historic sites from 18 countries, including Stonehenge, the archaeological areas of Pompeii and the ancient Kyoto temples. In addition to man-made sites, you can explore natural places: wander the sandy dunes of Australia’s Shark Bay or gaze up at the rock domes of Yosemite National Park in California.

World Wonders uses Street View technology to take you on a virtual trip to each iconic site. Most could not be filmed by car, so we used camera-carrying trikes to pedal our way close enough. The site also includes 3D models and YouTube videos of the historical places, so you can dig in and get more information and a broader view of each site. We also partnered with several prestigious organizations, including UNESCO, the World Monuments Fund, Getty Images and Ourplace, who provided official information and photographs for many of the sites.

We hope World Wonders will prove to be a valuable educational resource for students and scholars. A selection of educational packages are available to download for classroom use; you can also share the site content with friends.

World Wonders is part of our commitment to preserving culture online and making it accessible to everyone. Under the auspices of the Google Cultural Institute, we’re publishing high resolution images of the Dead Sea Scrolls, digitizing the archives of famous figures such as Nelson Mandela and presenting thousands of artworks through the Art Project.

There has been explosive growth in ad technology over the last 20 years. From each of our perspectives -- whether you are an agency, an advertiser, publisher or a technology provider -- we can all still see unprecedented opportunities as the digital world continues to grow and diversify.

We believe that as an industry, we’re on a common digital journey and that the next wave of innovation in ad tech will come from us all working better together.

However, like all great opportunities, there are challenges and questions, such as:

How do we unlock the next $50 billion of opportunity for digital advertising?

How do we deliver those immersive, interactive experiences to today’s empowered consumer demands?

What do we, as part of the ad tech ecosystem, need to build to create even more value for our clients and consumers?

On June 5th we’re hosting the DoubleClick Insights event to start exploring some answers to these questions. Senior leaders from top agencies, advertisers and publishers will help lead the conversation -- and you’re invited to join via the live stream! Register here.

The agenda will include topics such as:

Adapting to the Empowered Consumer - Neal Mohan, Vice President, Display Advertising at Google will be joined by David Kenny, Chairman & CEO, The Weather Channel Companies, and James Pitaro, Co-President, Disney Interactive Media Group, to discuss how technology is being used to deliver new content and advertising experiences to consumers.

If We Build It, Will They (Consumers) Come? Terry Kawaja, CEO and Co-Founder, Luma Partners (and creator of the now legendary LUMAscape chart) will lead a conversation about the ad tech ecosystem, and what it needs to do next to add value for agencies, publishers, marketers – and ultimately consumers. Terry will be joined onstage by:

Omar Tawokol, Chief Executive Officer, BlueKai

Greg Stuart, Global CEO of Mobile Marketing Association

Kurt Unkel, President, VivaKi

Shishir Mehrota, Vice President of Product Management, YouTube

Outside the Box: Technology = Creative Friend or Foe? Technology is supposed to make the life of a marketer easier. For our final conversation, we’re going to focus on the question of: Is this technology exploring resulting in better marketing? Or, is it just resulting in mediocre creative and complexity for both consumers and marketers? Karim Temsamani, Vice President - New Products and Solutions, Google moderates the conversation with leaders from creative agencies, iconic brands and publishers including:

Brad Ruffkess, Global Connection, Coca-Cola

Mike Lowenstern, Managing Director of Digital Advertising, R/GA

Peter Minnium, Head of Digital Brand Initiatives, IAB

John Caldwell, Chief Digital Officer, National Geographic

The live stream will start on June 5, 2012, at 9:00 am PDT, and you’ll be able to watch from your computer, tablet, or mobile device. To learn more about our highlighted speakers go to the Speakers page on our site.

Truly great search is all about turning intentions into actions, lightning fast. In the early days of Google, users would type in a query, we’d return ten blue links, and they’d move on happy. Today people want more. When searching for great local restaurants, people want places to eat right there on the results page, not another click or two away. It’s the same with hotels, flight options, directions and shopping.

Organizing these types of data can be very different from indexing the Web, because the information is often not publicly available. It requires deep partnerships with different industries—from financial services and travel to merchants who sell physical goods.

Today we’re announcing a new initiative to improve our shopping experience over time--so that shoppers (your customers) can easily research purchases, compare different products, their features and prices, and then connect directly with merchants to make their purchase.

Google Shopping

First, we are starting to transition Google Product Search in the U.S. to a purely commercial model built on Product Listing Ads. This new product discovery experience will be called Google Shopping and the transition will be complete this fall. We believe that having a commercial relationship with merchants will encourage them to keep their product information fresh and up to date. Higher quality data—whether it’s accurate prices, the latest offers or product availability—should mean better shopping results for users, which in turn should create higher quality traffic for merchants.

We’re giving merchants a few months to transition to this new model, and we’re also offering some incentives:

All merchants who create Product Listing Ads by August 15, 2012 will automatically receive a monthly credit for 10% of their total Product Listing Ad spend through the end of 2012; and

Existing Google Product Search merchants can receive $100 AdWords credit toward Product Listing Ads if they fill out a form before August 15, 2012.

Ranking in Google Shopping, when the full transition is complete this fall, will be based on a combination of relevance and bid price--just like Product Listing Ads today. This will give merchants greater control over where their products appear on Google Shopping. Over time they will also have the opportunity to market special offers such as “30% off all refracting telescopes.”

In addition, merchants who want to stand out from the crowd can choose to participate in our new Google Trusted Stores program. Google Trusted Stores is a badge for e-commerce sites which gives users background on merchants—whatever their size—including ratings for on-time shipping and customer service. Google stands behind merchants that have earned the Google Trusted Stores badge with a $1,000 lifetime purchase protection guarantee per shopper.

Google.com

Second, starting today we’ve also begun to experiment with some new commercial formats on Google.com that will make it easier for users to find and compare different products. These include larger product images that give shoppers a better sense of what is available and also the ability to refine a search by brand or product type. For example, here’s what stargazers could see on Google.com when searching for [telescopes].

Search results for [telescopes] in the new Google Shopping experience

These new formats are clearly labeled “sponsored,” and take space currently occupied by AdWords. If people are looking for a specific product, such as [Celestron CPC 800], they might also see a new design that summarizes information about that particular item neatly in one place. They can then easily decide whether it is what they want, and buy it from their merchant of choice.

Results for specific product queries like [Celestron CPC 800] may include reviews and product attributes

We’re excited about building delightful shopping experiences for consumers in close partnership with merchants. Google Shopping will empower businesses of all sizes to compete effectively--and it will help shoppers turn their intentions into actions lightning fast. Today’s changes are a first step toward providing technology, tools and traffic to help power the retail ecosystem.

Truly great search is all about turning intentions into actions, lightning fast. In the early days of Google, users would type in a query, we’d return ten blue links, and they’d move on happy. Today people want more. When searching for great local restaurants, people want places to eat right there on the results page, not another click or two away. It’s the same with hotels, flight options, directions and shopping.

Organizing these types of data can be very different from indexing the Web, because the information is often not publicly available. It requires deep partnerships with different industries—from financial services and travel to merchants who sell physical goods.

Today we’re announcing a new initiative to improve our shopping experience over time--so that shoppers (your customers) can easily research purchases, compare different products, their features and prices, and then connect directly with merchants to make their purchase.

Google Shopping

First, we are starting to transition Google Product Search in the U.S. to a purely commercial model built on Product Listing Ads. This new product discovery experience will be called Google Shopping and the transition will be complete this fall. We believe that having a commercial relationship with merchants will encourage them to keep their product information fresh and up to date. Higher quality data—whether it’s accurate prices, the latest offers or product availability—should mean better shopping results for users, which in turn should create higher quality traffic for merchants.

We’re giving merchants a few months to transition to this new model, and we’re also offering some incentives:

All merchants who create Product Listing Ads by August 15, 2012 will automatically receive a monthly credit for 10% of their total Product Listing Ad spend through the end of 2012; and

Existing Google Product Search merchants can receive $100 AdWords credit toward Product Listing Ads if they fill out a form before August 15, 2012.

Ranking in Google Shopping, when the full transition is complete this fall, will be based on a combination of relevance and bid price--just like Product Listing Ads today. This will give merchants greater control over where their products appear on Google Shopping. Over time they will also have the opportunity to market special offers such as “30% off all refracting telescopes.”

In addition, merchants who want to stand out from the crowd can choose to participate in our new Google Trusted Stores program. Google Trusted Stores is a badge for e-commerce sites which gives users background on merchants—whatever their size—including ratings for on-time shipping and customer service. Google stands behind merchants that have earned the Google Trusted Stores badge with a $1,000 lifetime purchase protection guarantee per shopper.

Google.com

Second, starting today we’ve also begun to experiment with some new commercial formats on Google.com that will make it easier for users to find and compare different products. These include larger product images that give shoppers a better sense of what is available and also the ability to refine a search by brand or product type. For example, here’s what stargazers could see on Google.com when searching for [telescopes].

Search results for [telescopes] in the new Google Shopping experience

These new formats are clearly labeled “sponsored,” and take space currently occupied by AdWords. If people are looking for a specific product, such as [Celestron CPC 800], they might also see a new design that summarizes information about that particular item neatly in one place. They can then easily decide whether it is what they want, and buy it from their merchant of choice.

Results for specific product queries like [Celestron CPC 800] may include reviews and product attributes

We’re excited about building delightful shopping experiences for consumers in close partnership with merchants. Google Shopping will empower businesses of all sizes to compete effectively--and it will help shoppers turn their intentions into actions lightning fast. Today’s changes are a first step toward providing technology, tools and traffic to help power the retail ecosystem.

As opposed to what? The *non*-technical conference for people who write operating systems in their free time? :-) Anyway, it turned out mostly true. It was my first BSDCan and it was very focused on actually developing BSD systems, as opposed to other conferences that have more of an emphasis on deploying BSD.

It was a very full several days: too much to cover here, but I want to call out several great talks.

Locking mechanismsMy first talk was Kirk McKusick's overview of locking in the FreeBSD kernel. It wasn't about what to lock when, it was an overview of the different locking mechanisms in FreeBSD, all 7 of them. I really liked what I heard, finally some place where spinning is still considered cool under the right circumstances. The talk covered lending out higher priorities that a waiting thread might have to a thread holding a lock the waiter wants, lock order and detecting violations thereof and went off to describe the various more and much more featureful kinds of locks in the kernel today. Highly relevant even for those not working on a BSD, but it makes us who are stuck in userland sad.

ZFSNow I know where my RAM goes. Holy cow. Big webs of buffers. Lots of data structures. Lots of aggressive readahead and other speculative reads (prime example is for contiguous writes which are interrupted by synchronous reads of metadata for block allocation information, so why not preemptively read all this stuff?). Buffer duplication, some for good reasons (new buffers for zRAID splits), some for bad reasons (underdeveloped). I’m still not sure how out of sync the view of a mmap'ed file wrt the view that read/write/seek presents is (reminds me of the early Mach VM). The whole session pointed out repeatedly how much emphasis they put on keeping "all parts of the system as saturated as possible". Interesting that much of this work and other work presented was happening in some form of Hypervisor (in this case XEN).

Consumer router productsMy friend Stefan Bethke gave a talk about his work to make FreeBSD work on various consumer router products. Think OpenWRT but BSD based. Much of the talk described how the devices in these routers are mostly in a tree but the vendors made some things very odd which led to a bunch of circular dependencies in the device structure, preventing regular driver startup. Stefan was forced to experiment with various schemes of proxy device drivers that get all the ducks in a row before the actual drivers find everything they need. Much cheering from the embedded crowd ensued.

Recent IPv6 securityThe main takeaway was that there is a serious problem in IPv6 resulting from packet fragmentation potentially dividing a packet within the header which then of course makes firewalls and other packet inspection mechanisms unable to find out what's going on.

My main takeaways:- Hypervisors of some form are making it into all kinds of systems and environments.- Don't buy systems that can't take registered RAM in a bazillion sockets.- Huge amounts of data are "in flight" these days, both network and disk.- Testing on systems with single memory banks will be useless soon.- Flash memory and methods of dealing with its problems are a hot topic. It looks like people decided to tank through the problems and not wait for better storage cells.

After launching nearly four years ago, the Google Affiliate Network Help Center has been regularly updated with articles to help you find answers to common issues, manage your account, and learn affiliate marketing best practices.

Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve launched improvements to the design of our Help Center to give you easy access to help content that is most relevant to you.

The new design features four main sections:

Get Started in the left navigation has basic information about Google Affiliate Network and how to launch or activate your advertiser or publisher account.

Learn about Google Affiliate Network contains articles organized by category. Quickly find information you need about your account, managing ads, running reports, and many other areas. Plus, we’ve added a comprehensive FAQ that covers the most common questions users ask.

Fix an issue helps you troubleshoot and resolve specific issues.

Additional resources in the right navigation includes more ways to connect with us and get support such as our forum, Twitter feed, and even this blog.

In the next few weeks, look out for new help articles as well as additional changes to further simplify your Help Center experience.

Ready to get started? Visit the Advertiser or Publisher Help Center today. After you’ve taken a few minutes to check out the redesigned Help Center, we’d love to hear from you in our forum.

In 2016, it’s estimated that almost half of the world’s population will be online, yet nearly 50 percent of the websites we visit are found in the .com top-level domain (TLD), which was among the first TLDs created in 1984. Despite the great opportunities the web has enabled for people around the world, there is still a lingering question about the diversity of the domain space (given that the number of generic TLDs has only increased by 14 in the last 28 years).

In 2008, ICANN announced a program to expand the number of generic TLDs (think .com, .org, .edu), developed through its bottom-up, multi-stakeholder process, in which we participate. Given this expansion process, we decided to submit applications for new TLDs, which generally fall into four categories:

Our trademarks, like .google

Domains related to our core business, like .docs

Domains that will improve user experience, such as .youtube, which can increase the ease with which YouTube channels and genres can be identified

Domains we think have interesting and creative potential, such as .lol

We want to make the introduction of new generic TLDs a good experience for web users and site owners. So we will:

Make security and abuse prevention a high priority

Work with all ICANN-accredited registrars

Work with brand owners to develop sensible rights protection mechanisms that build upon ICANN’s requirements

We’re just beginning to explore this potential source of innovation on the web, and we are curious to see how these proposed new TLDs will fare in the existing TLD environment. By opening up more choices for Internet domain names, we hope people will find options for more diverse—and perhaps shorter—signposts in cyberspace.

Earlier this month, we announced new features in AdWords that provide a simple solution for developers and businesses with a mobile app to acquire users and track downloads. Tomorrow (May 31st) at 10am PST, 1pm EST, we’re hosting a live Hangout On Air with Product Manager Anurag Agrawal in a conversation with businesses who have been early to test this out - Brian Wright, Sr. Marketing Manager at Lookout Mobile Security, and Troy Morris, Mobile Marketing Manager at WhitePages. We’ll also be demonstrating how to use the new Mobile App Extension, and set up Android Download Tracking inside AdWords.

Security online is a shared responsibility and we take our role very seriously. We work hard to proactively identify security threats, protect our users and their personal information, and help make the Internet a safer place.

So when we realized that some of our users’ computers or routers were infected with malware called DNSChanger—and that we could tell which of our users were infected—we notified them and directed them to the tools they needed to clean their computer and ensure connectivity. We’ve already notified half a million individuals about DNSChanger infections on their devices.

While we can’t detect most kinds of malware, sometimes we’re able to use data to discover unusual patterns. For example, irregular activity in our search traffic could indicate activity from a botnet or denial of service attack, and we take steps to notify the appropriate authorities and our users. This isn’t the first time that we’ve been able to detect malware and alert our users—we reached a million users last summer during a similar malware notification.

We are constantly developing new security technologies and contributing research and open source tools to the security industry. We’ve provided SSL encryption by default for Gmail accounts, notified users about suspicious activity or tampering with their Google accounts, created tools to detect and act upon potentially dangerous sites in our search index, help browser and web developers to protect their users from malicious links with the freely available Safebrowsing API, and delivered automatic security updates to the Chrome browser.

We’re also collaborating with the Industry Botnet Group, a group of ISPs, security groups, industry leaders, and law enforcement entities that share expertise and aggregate resources for countering botnets. The U.S. Department of Commerce recently highlighted the success of this initiative in bringing together private sector actors to address the issue of botnets. And the White House held an event today applauding the success of industry partnerships in addressing these issues— recognizing like many in Congress that transparency and information sharing are critical to addressing security risks on the Internet. Google is also continuing to address botnet security concerns through the Federal Communications Commission’s Communications, Security, Reliability, and Interoperability Council (CSRIC), which includes participants from both the public and private sectors.

I’ve always been fascinated by famous historic and cultural sites from around the world. When I was a child, flipping through encyclopedias while researching for school projects, the thought of exploring these sites was a distant dream. With the new Google World Wonders Project, that dream is now a little closer for students and others around the globe.

The World Wonders Project enables you to discover 132 historic sites from 18 countries, including Stonehenge, the archaeological areas of Pompeii and the ancient Kyoto temples. In addition to man-made sites, you can explore natural places: wander the sandy dunes of Australia’s Shark Bay or gaze up at the rock domes of Yosemite National Park in California.

World Wonders uses Street View technology to take you on a virtual trip to each iconic site. Most could not be filmed by car, so we used camera-carrying trikes to pedal our way close enough. The site also includes 3D models and YouTube videos of the historical places, so you can dig in and get more information and a broader view of each site. We also partnered with several prestigious organizations, including UNESCO, the World Monuments Fund, Getty Images and Ourplace, who provided official information and photographs for many of the sites.

We hope World Wonders will prove to be a valuable educational resource for students and scholars. A selection of educational packages are available to download for classroom use; you can also share the site content with friends.

World Wonders is part of our commitment to preserving culture online and making it accessible to everyone. Under the auspices of the Google Cultural Institute, we’re publishing high resolution images of the Dead Sea Scrolls, digitizing the archives of famous figures such as Nelson Mandela and presenting thousands of artworks through the Art Project.